QUEER WAYS OF WALKING. 
45 
somest snakes, are not very abundant in New Hampshire. 
What this pair could find to live upon in this place, other 
than the insects and spiders that might come that way, I 
cannot imagine. It is probable that such was a major 
part of their diet. 
Queer Ways of Walking. I. 
BY EDWARD J. BURNHAM. 
It is a fault with much of our nature study writing for 
children that we make too much of what we term the nat¬ 
ural order in the development of plant and animal life. 
The idea is relatively so new, even to the oldest of us, it 
has appealed to us with such force, that we attempt to load 
down the child with it, and set him to dragging a chain in 
his walks afield. 
We prepare our text-books in the most orderly manner, 
and with a gravity which, under the circumstances, is half 
comical, beginning with man, perhaps, and going back 
through the long line of vertebrates to the sea squirts; or, 
we begin with the sea squirts, and climb painfully up to 
man again, expecting the boy to be profoundly impressed. 
But he is not. He is sure to disappoint us. Some day, 
bald-headed and with spectacles on, he may argue with 
other spectacled bald-heads, and maintain his ground, 
that, because a cross-vein in the wing of some insect arises 
from the principal at an angle of thirty degrees, instead of 
thirty-five, an entire group should be rearranged ; but for 
the present, being a boy, he hates the thought of any kind 
of chain and the merest suggestion of order. 
Besides, there is not, in his time and in his locality, any 
such “chain” as we tell him of. Any plant or animal 
that he comes upon is undoubtedly a link, but the link 
